A Mad Fan's Write

I'm a Beatlemaniac but whenever I attempt to voice what I feel for the band I never feel that I am truly sharing enough about them. This has sated me, for now at least.

A beautiful disturbance entered the air in the final week of November 1964 and united every Briton listening to it. The person could have had their ear to the radio or been unconsciously listening to the transmissions as they shaved. All these people would have started at a the strange sound that exited their respective machines. They then would have waited for the transmission or the radio to right itself and be even more put out when it sounds worsened. Depending on the listener’s paranoia, they could have thought their radio was broken or that the Reds had landed and taken over the BBC. Then a guitar riff exited the speakers followed by John Lennon's voice. This was The Beatles new single, I Feel Fine, and the first use of the rock ‘n roll plague- speaker feedback- as an intentional and integral part of a song’s make-up. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr managed within less than a decade as signed musicians to change and shake up the sentiment, order and tradition of music.

The two arches of a lowercase ‘m’ have more pop culture relevance in food but the moptop heads of Lennon and McCartney bent together apply just as well. Lennon was a man of controversial thought with a sharp wit rivalled only by his bird’s beak nose and McCartney is a bright-eyed charmer with a sense for mainstream success and the cheeks of a toddler. Their differing styles are most noticeable in We Can Work It Out. McCartney sings of the relationship’s potential and Lennon the futility of it all. Their true equal arches were their determination and creativity, which were already sturdy structures singularly, when put together made an even greater artistic creation. The 'u' is for the great unity they all obviously shared and is, too, an adequate symbol for the great highs and lows experienced by the band. They were and still are a commercial force with which to be reckoned. Every piece of media they produced didn't turn to gold; it went platinum over and over. But not everything glimmered. They were near-unable to leave their own homes; McCartney having a constant gaggle of girls outside his home known as the ‘Gate Birds’. The early death of their long-time manager Brian Epstein whilst on a spiritual retreat rocked them all and they were subject to such isolation caused by their popularity that whilst touring their wives and girlfriends had to be snuck in with the laundry in order to see them. S is 'The Long and Winding Road' of the Fab Four journey. It began in a Lanchashire trade port, progressed to nights in Hamburg's Reeperbahn clubs with strip-tease intermissions, beneath Liverpool in the Cavern Club, across Europe, in small St John's Wood recording studios, Europe again, the United States of America in an atmosphere of shrieking, back to Britain, battles with the Bible Belt, a sold-out concert in Queens’ Shea Stadium, their own Thrilla in Manila after a political scandal involving the Filipino First Lady, even more acquaintance with the Abbey Road studios, a ceasing of touring, the first concept album Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, a spiritual retreat to India that began with Starr's stomach illness and ended in distaste, a bucket load of infidelity, two very different marriages in very close proximity and a legal battle that aimed to separate the only sphere of life in which each Beatles were not by then estranged: contractually. The journey ended on the 8th of December 1980 after bullets had been let loose and Lennon’s blood stained the Dakota building steps permanently silencing any ‘disturbance’ a reunion might have caused. I. The most personal of the pronouns and ultimately the downfall of the Beatles. They weren’t four quarter-people but four individuals that made up an outstanding whole. The concept of the Beatles that had been fashioned after several years left no room for personal growth, causing this constricting jacket of external expectations to constrict their creative growth. A person changes to accommodate the differences in themselves experiences have instilled in them. The demands the high standard they had built for themselves caused men that had been joined at the hip by musical passion to feel handcuffed together by the wrist due to contractual obligation. The Beatles were like air particles: the more they rose, the further apart they became. “See how they ruuuun” is a reference to a mother’s stocking and a child’s bootlace in Lady Madonna but ‘c’ how the music changed! In 1963 the men were confined to set lists made up of primarily failsafe covers and ditties about losing love, gaining love, feelings about love and good times. Within six years they had released songs of storytelling loneliness (Eleanor Rigby), scathing transparency (I’m Looking Through You), spiritual omnipresence (Within You Without You), serial killers with highly specific modus operandi (Maxwell’s Silver Hammer) and poetic folk-psychedelia that included Sanskrit mantras (Across the Universe). The Beatles, like many a concept, are dependent on how they are approached in order to live on. The benefits of an essay with enough narrative, airy whimsy, concrete fact and adequate thought are that it can be read in whichever way and shake-up sentiment, tradition and order in an effort to emulate the people mentioned so very frequently above and hopefully keep a flame built long before one’s birth keep burning long after one’s ashes have been lifted away by the wind and time. George Harrison was correct when saying “The Beatles will exist without us.” He was speaking of himself and his band mates and maybe even a producer. The true ‘us’ that keeps the Beatles thriving, though, is the writer and reader of the last 954 words.

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